


The Good Scientist

by actuallyalivingsaint



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: Other, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 11:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5538872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actuallyalivingsaint/pseuds/actuallyalivingsaint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Myra, an inventor and a theoretical physicist discovers a window into the past...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Good Scientist

Hello, Im Professor Gaines and this is introduction to temporally correct history.

To start Id like to tell you a story about a woman named Myra, and how she changed the world. Pull up a chair and get comfortable, grab some coffee first if you have to. Ill wait.

Everyone seated and ready? Great. If you could just turn off your phones and other communication devices as well that would be swell. Yeah you there in the back, i mean you. Turn it off or a blow an EMP in the room and we will be doing this by candle light. Don't test me i did it last semester. Great, now lets move on.

 

Myra was always good at her job. 

From the time she was a child she had been a bright curious person. She had always asked questions. A lot of questions, much to the irritation of the adults around her she always asked questions they did not know the answers to. When she was old enough to go to school she realized the questions she asked often found their answers in science class, though these of course lead to more and more questions, about how the world and the universe worked around us. Though science gave her many of the answers she sought, others were answered from history, mathematics and the other subjects that children study.

On she grew and on she learned. Time passed by and Myra realized a truth that many of us learn as we grow. That the history we were taught in schools was often wrong. Then she learned why. As more time passed, this realization stayed with her. That what she was learning might not be true. It might have been censored or altered to fit a particular agenda. Many people simply become jaded upon learning this, but otherwise go about their lives.

Not Myra.

Myra wanted the truth.

She wanted it badly. So badly it drove her studies. She sought a way to reclaim knowledge that had been lost, destroyed or erased.

She did this by the study oh physics. She as a child had read science fiction, like many bright curious children and one story had stuck with her, it was about a man who had invented a device to look into the past. She reasoned if she understood enough about the world and its laws she might one day build such a device in reality. It was the kind of fantasy that tends to drive the very young.

More time passed and she one day went to college, to study theoretical physics and electrical engineering. More pragmatic by this time, her fantasy subdued by the reality around her. Though it had been a childish dream, her love of physics was quite real and continued to drive her to excel. This is not uncommon in many bright people learning science. On she studied and learned until she graduated at the top of her class, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.

She made her career studying and writing papers on the nature of time and space, how they functioned, how they didn't and what it all meant for the rest of us. Her childhood fantasy while not forgotten, had been tamed into a more realistic worldview. The old story hypothesized that if you could measure accurately enough the various electromagnetic signals in the environment you could calculate where they once were, including light and by these calculations you could generate a visual image of the past. 

This was of course nonsense. It often gave her a laugh thinking back to this. Now of course she had learned many answers and generated even more questions. Time as she understood it, moved basically one way, from the past to the future, though her and her colleagues couldn't prove this with certainty without a theory of quantum gravity. Without this general relativity suggested traveling through time in an unconventional manner might actually be possible. Though nobody of reputation took that possibility seriously. At least not out loud.

Myra and her peers worked to create this theory of quantum gravity, each one of them working the problem in different ways hoping to be the first one to make the discovery. Myra even took her work home with her to work on mathematical formulas and physical models. She spent most of her free time on this and most people who knew her thought nothing of it, it wasn't uncommon for someone like her to get pulled into their work after all.

One night she was on her computer working the latest models well into the early morning. It was a friday night so she had nowhere to be the next day so of course she stayed up late to work. She worked until as she was prone to do, fell asleep at her desk. 

She woke up with a start. Light coming in from the window into her eyes, she blinked at the harsh rays and sat up waiting for her vision to clear. Half asleep she hits the button on her coffee machine to warm up last nights leftovers and she stretches, trying to clear the fog of sleep from her mind. Looking at her monitor she notices a post-it note stuck to it. In handwriting eerily similar to hers were the words "turtles all the way down". The note looked like she wrote it, but she did not remember doing so, pulling it off she looks at the desktop. Entering in the screensaver password she accesses the data she had been working on.  
This wasn't right at all either. Now that she was fully awake she was sure that these weren't the models she was using last night.

She wondered if someone had broken in and altered her models while she slept, she knew that achievements like this were pretty competitive and it was possible that one of her peers might have tried to sabotage her work. She looked into the computer logs for signs of intrusion, the odd thing is the only one who had logged into her machine after she fell asleep was her, or at least her password. Could she have done more work than she thought and forgotten it due to sleep deprivation? She was well aware that lack of sleep could cause delusions and hallucinations. Hopefully her backups were recent enough so that only a small amount of work was lost. She looked at the models in detail, trying to remember what she had been thinking and hoping she would remember what she was doing then. 

It certainly looked like her style of work, but it was also radically different than the approach she was currently on. In this model of quantum gravity, it did indeed unify quantum mechanics and general relativity but the way it did so made her say out loud "That can't be possible." 

The model unified the theories, and predicted matter with negative mass, allowing for the creation of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, what most people would call a wormhole. She laughed, she must have been really out of it to come up with this. If this were even remotely possible she thought, it would not be too hard to actually find the stuff. Surely someone would have done so by now right? She thought again...would they? Not knowing this model they really wouldn't quite know what to look for. She thought some more, if this model were true she would know what to look for. She would have to order some equipment to setup the experiment, and borrow some from work as well but at least disproving this to herself would set her mind at ease and allow her to continue the rest of her work in peace.

She ordered her equipment and borrowed what she needed from her work, while there was mild pushback from this, there were perks to being one of the best in her field ad they tended to give leeway in the hopes of future results. If Myra said she needed some equipment she tended to get it. She set up her experiment in her home, her electrical wiring had long ago been upgraded to handle much higher voltages and nobody asked too many questions as to why her electricity bill *wasn't* high, but if they did Myra wouldn't have told them about the small thorium reactor in the basement. She liked to take her work home.

 

She setup her experiment, an effort to capture exotic matter and measure its negative mass. If it existed then the equipment should be able to detect it, it it didn't...well then she would know without embarrassing herself in front of her peers for going on such an absurd wild goose chase.

So she powered on her machines and ran her calculations and preformed her experiment. To her utter amazement it worked and had captured exotic matter. Not much mind you, there were limits to what she could do with the equipment at the time, but a little was still enough. Sitting there having contained exotic matter her old childhood fantasy came alive again in her mind. Wormholes, or as the big heads over at the physics department call them "Einstein-Rosen bridges" connected two points in spacetime, that meant one could connect one point in this space and time, and a second in another space and time. She could create a window into the past itself.

Still keeping her discovery a secret, she ordered more supplies and equipment to make use of the exotic matter she had collected. She wanted to not only prove her model, but prove it in a big and world changing way. She was going to give people their past and she was going to show them what was true.

She spent months building the first device.

She took a leave of absence from her job, sold off her retirement fund. 

She poured her resources into building the first device. It was expensive, it used a lot of materials and power and it was big. Much like most new technology. When she powered it on for the first time, the first thing she wanted to see was that night she had written the model, she couldn't get it out of her head and never did remember how she managed it. So she set the temporal coordinance and powered on the machine, intending to just watch herself work from afar. 

When the window opened she could see herself, working on that old laptop on her old models, she watched herself work until she saw herself fall asleep, just as she had remembered. A few minutes passed and she realized that she had not forgotten what she worked on, because the her at the time hadn't actually worked on it. Realizing what she had to do she loaded the model and figures on to a USB device and stuck her head and hands through the window. It was barely large enough to fit so she had to be careful. She reached over to her old laptop, logged in and transferred the model onto the machine, replacing the model she had been working on. Then with a chuckle, she grabbed a post-it note and wrote on it "turtles all the way down" and stuck it on the screen. She carefully pulled herself back through the window and turned off the device.

Time is a funny thing sometimes, but we will cover the inner workings of bootstrap paradoxes later in the semester.

After her first trial run had been successful, and self fulfilling she remembered the old science fiction story and how such a device could be used as a method of unlimited surveillance that could not be blocked or stopped short of killing the person watching you. But good luck with that if they see you coming right?

Myra had a dilemma but she was also very very clever. See a lot of science geeks are very very smart, but some of them tend to lack cunning and common sense. Myra wasn't one of those people. She decided that the only way to keep the device from being used for evil purposes was to use the device on those who would use it for evil purposes. So she did. She used it to record every backdoor deal, every bribe, every corrupt official, every assassination and every dirty deed done by every government and major corporation in the world. She saved all of these recordings on to hundreds of high capacity hard drives in hundreds of places all across the world and then she filed for a patent on her device and went public with her discovery. 

During the press conference she stated that her device would allow people to look into the past and see historical events in real time, how they actually happened and that she would not allow her device to be used by those in power for any other purpose. To ensure this she said, she was going to take away their power. She told the reporters where to find every single hard drive. She said, with so many hard drives in so many places there was no possible way for each one to be intercepted or destroyed and she was right. 

The media jumped on those hard drives like hungry cats jumping a wounded rabbit and the revelations shook the world for years. Once the dust settled Myra formed an ethics committee to help manage the use of the devices for their intended purposes by using the devices to monitor the intelligence agencies of every nation, and monitor everyone with a significant degree of power. Anyone caught trying to acquire or build one of her devices was exposed to the public. Anyone doing anything her committee deemed unethical was exposed to the public. The intelligence agencies of the world fell within five years. With Myra and her devices none of the powers at the time could keep a secret from anyone or gather secrets from anyone. Spying is a dirty business after all. 

She ensured the privacy of the common citizen by depriving the powers of the world of their privacy. Everything they did had to be above board and transparent or Myra's committee would let the world know. During all of this time governments fell and were replaced all over the world. Revolutions happened and people created great changes in the political landscape. Now the world will never be perfect, and of course its not now. People die in accidents, people still get sick, people do bad things, but the people who have been chosen to lead are now forcefully held to a much higher standard. Common people are also ensured their privacy. Myra did not want her invention to be abused and she ensured that it wasn't. 

She wanted it to be used for people to understand the truth of their past and the truth of everyone's past. We can't make educated choices about the future if we don't truly understand where we came from. But that's why you are all here as temporal archeologists, to learn about the truth of the past using Myra's window. 

That's all for today and remember to bring clothing appropriate to 2550 B.C Egypt next time because we are going to be observing the construction of a pyramid. In person. Bring sunscreen too. See you next week.


End file.
